SPOILER ALERT: Do not read any further if you haven't watched the eight episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day. We're launching this blog to coincide with US broadcast dates so there's a place all fans can discuss the show together. Sorry, UK viewers – if you're waiting for the show to air on BBC1, do come back here after Thursday's broadcast.

End of the Road

Can it really be true? Is Miracle Day finally coming into its own as it approaches its final furlong? Finally, after weeks of the same episode over and again, concentration camp shock tactics and an actually-rather-great character piece last week, episode eight brings a tidal wave of answers. Oh, exposition, you have been a cruel mistress. Most of these answers are, of course, nonsense. But as has been said many times on this blog, we don't mind nonsense. As Torchwood viewers, we positively embrace it. But deep in the Colasanto residence, as poor old (extremely old actually) Angelo lies, barely alive, a picture begins to fall into place of a man, driven by closeted heartbreak, falling in with a bad lot and inadvertently starting the chain of events and corruption that would eventually lead to the Miracle.

We've still got two hours for the whys and wherefores, but here, finally is a sense of a story moving on. Maybe we'll actually get to see some ALIENS before long? As the show gets its act together, so does the CIA, smoking out the bad apple Friedkin, teaming up with Torchwood and drafting a nice, immoral (rather than amoral) authority figure we can work with, played by John de Lancie (Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation). Along with all of that is an emotional suckerpunch as Esther learns that her troubled sister is volunteering herself – and her children – for Category One status. Unremittingly grim, but we're getting somewhere.

"The bisected bride, she's basically made up of positive thinking and colostomy bags…"

After what was probably a wise rest, Jilly and Oswald are back and the show's most compelling characters finally see their story move along. It's still uncomfortable that a murderous paedophile is being played for laughs against a high-heeled career bitch, but when Jilly's getting lines like these it's hard to make incredulity last. It's not at all clear whether we're being asked to believe that Oswald's bizarre ascension to People's Champion has somehow stemmed his urges, but the fact that the game is up and he's learned about the plan for Category Zero sets things up nicely for a feral-monster-on-the-loose denouement. And Jilly, free of him, is apparently sleepwalking straight into the employ of the Big Bad. I'm getting a sense that this isn't going to end well for Jilly. But I really, really hope it does.

Transatlantic tension

Excellent skills from Agent Cooper, raging against her deportation with the fury of a catfight outside the Swansea Ritzy, having faced off against the giants of the CIA with the declaration that "I could murder a pint of bitter". But as the miracle causes both Greece and Ireland to declare bankruptcy, threatening to take the entire European Union down with them, might things just be getting a little too topical here?

Samesex watch

"You're telling me the whole world got screwed up because two gay guys had a hissy fit?"

"Rex, step back in your cave," censures Gwen. But to be fair to Rex, that's pretty much exactly what happened. Yet there's a tender goodbye between Jack and the aged Angelo, a sense of the real love between them, and a touching reference to Ianto.

Classified information

• More existential guilt of the working mother from Gwen: "Jack, did we just join the CIA?"

• More consequences of the miracle. Since cancer cells are immortal, they may now be mortal. Washington's trying to keep it quiet in case it leads to a mass outpouring of joy, but, as Q from Star Trak gleefully says: "we can smoke our way to the next great depression."

• Esther's mate is in with 'The Family'. Oh dear.

• "What is it with you, Red Baron? You got Snoopy up your ass?"

• Did the Colasanto grand-daughter and Friedkin go the same way as Dr Vera when the car bomb went off?